Europe: not in our fields

The European Commission and the GM seeds industry invented the idea of coexistence between GM and conventional farming to get GM crops accepted. So why are the GM companies backing a plan to set up a seed bank near the North Pole where it can’t be contaminated?

The Norwegian government has revived plans to build an artificial cave inside a frozen mountain on the island of Svalbard on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The idea is that the genetic diversity currently found in the crops we grow can be preserved by freezing their seeds in the cave. Two million sets of seeds representing all currently known varieties of crop would be put inside this end-of-the-world safe. According to Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is promoting the idea: “Should the worst happen, this will allow the world to restart agriculture on this planet.” The project’s donors include Dupont and Syngenta, two multinational agrochemicals companies which own a significant share of the world’s biotechnology patents, and produce large numbers of genetically modified crops.

So the companies that promote GM crops are among the keenest advocates of the need to safeguard the world’s plant life. This should provoke concern, since it reflects compelling evidence that conventional plants are being contaminated by transgenic ones. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research has also raised the alarm. The group maintains a genebank containing more than half a million samples of seeds and covering most major crops. In 2004 it deemed that the probability of genebank collections becoming contaminated was high for maize and rape, medium for rice and cotton. Its report recommended immediate action

Contamination also threatens sources of diversity within a single species. These specific geographical locations are known as original centres of domestication. Mexico is the original centre of domestication and source of the diversity of maize. In 2001 researchers from Berkeley, California, revealed that local Mexican maize varieties had been contaminated by commercial, transgenic varieties from the United States, even though Mexico had a moratorium on GM crops at the time.

(2) David Quist and Ignacio Chapela, “Transgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico”, in Nature, no 414, 2001. The biotech lobby hotly contested this article, sparking a major controversy.

(3) According to Le Monde, 2 March 2006, media reports that the WTO had ruled against the EU were wrong: the WTO is critical of some EU’s countries’ decisions and of procedural delays in the issue of permits, but concludes that there is “no need to rule”. The WTO will issue a final report this month.